Damera Nageswara Rao

Centurion´s co-promoter and Vice President, Prof D. N. Rao is a social scientist and educator, promoting inclusion and diversity, catalyzing social entrepreneurship and employability in eastern India´s backward and socially restless outposts. By training, Prof Rao is a civil engineer (Osmania Univ), PGDM (IIM Kolkata), and British Chevening Scholar trained at University of Durham on building enterprise and business incubators. He has taught at XIMB from 1996 to 2005.

Prof Rao has worked across the core sector in areas of rural development and upliftment. He has been a Project Director on Project Water funded by the Indo − Canadian Water Facility.

He has also been the social advisor for the study on establishing baseline for the measurement of socio-economic impact of the power sector reforms in Orissa.

He has been the Project Leader for the project on Mapping Food insecurity areas and identifying families at risk of starvation. (The project is funded by Hunger Foundation and the client is OSDMA, Government of Orissa).

Prof Rao has been the local team leader for the Institutional Analysis and Design study for the Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Project funded by DFID. During the span of 4 years from 1989-1993, he has managed many development projects aimed at improving the incomes of tribals and other poor people in some of the most backward districts of Orissa.

He is one of the lead advisers and Project Director for the ongoing micro-privatisation initiative in the power sector in Orissa (partly funded by DFID and partly by BSES), Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and NOIDA. The DFID funded initiative is in the poverty stricken areas of the KBK region, implemented in 4500 villages in Odisha. It introduces and works on the concept of community participation in public service delivery mechanism, emanating from the 73rd / 74th Constitution Amendments which is empowering Village Panchayats.